This author gave a talk at HOPE in 2010ish about Twitterbots, long before they were a thing. In fact, he kind of made them a thing. Anyway, now he's talking about how online advertising doesn't really work, and that it's going to become too hard to ignore, and the industry will collapse, and it will take the entire internet with it. I hope he's wrong, but he makes quite the compelling argument.
Subprime Attention Crisis:Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet
Tim Hwang, 2020
"Programmatic Advertising" is an important term in this book, and refers to the automation of buying and selling of ads, at mind-blinding speed and without any human intervention or oversight at all.
Distinction between direct response advertising (see it, buy it) vs brand advertising ("shaping the public's associations with a brand and differentiating it from its competitors) (p80)
Mesothelioma - one of the most expensive keywords to advertise against (p83, ft21)
-Jim Leichenko, "The Most Expensive Keywords on Google - Anniversay Edition," Kantar Media, Sep 4 2018
Data arbitrage - marketing agencies sign deals for discounted prices for ad inventory for publishers, then resell the inventory at a higher price to their clients (pocketing the difference) (p105)
Surveillance Capitalism - Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Public Affairs. 2019
Ad damage (harm) - relies on invasion of privacy, incentivizes manipulating user behavior and seizing user attention in ways that may be harmful to mental health and physical development (Zuboff), and incentivizes media supporting information of echo chambers (Eli Parsier, The Filter Bubble, 2012)
(Also re harms of advertising) - The broad range of expression that the internet might otherwise enable has been limited to ways of connecting that are consistent with the financial needs of advertising. Advertising is complicit in restricting the grammar of social interaction online. (p117)
In envisioning a platform totally anonymous, he says it might "degrade into a ---digital wall of bathroom graffiti--- in a few hours. (p118) [I find an uncanny resemblance between this and the Wall of Public Shame and Social Miscourse that Facebook has morphed into.]
Post Script - About the Image:
I tried to search images for "shopping addiction" but it's weird because they're all smiling. You can't get a picture of someone holding a shopping bag with a scowl on their face, it just doesn't work. Even the articles about how to recognize if you have a compulsive shopping disorder show pictures of people smiling. I'll admit, it's hard to communicate visually, something about the two things together that doesn't work visually. Gambling addiction, on the other hand, is all dejected people with their head in their hands. So I decided to go for "Black Friday", because that's what it looks like when your culture -- not any one individual but the entire culture -- has a shopping addiction.
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